Forget Me Not
by BrittaJJ26
Summary: The lone survivor of a hospital fire, Andie, catches the attention of the Avengers, who are investigating the chain of destruction on her heels. But as they dive deeper, one unknown entity - the cause of Andie's vacant past - comes out of the woodwork. A reluctant alliance is forged with the Avengers in an attempt to keep her alive as they search for answers.
1. Chapter 1: Hide and Seek

"Come out, come out...where ever you are."

Andie gripped the scalpel tighter in her hands. Her breath was hot and toxic to taste as she stifled her coughing - the smoke was getting thicker. The EXIT sign across the hallway was still visible, but so was the floor.

She had to wait a little longer.

"Andie," the man called out. "Please, come out of hiding."

She peaked through the small gap between the desk and the wall to watch him. He was walking slowly and deliberately, his flat black eyes slowly scanning his surroundings.

 _"I love you, a bushel and a peck..."_ He sang calmly, flipping over a medical cart with a flick of his wrist. The medical equipment shattered over the floor, some glass sliding into her cover at her feet. She tucked her knees closer. _"A bushel and a peck...it makes my heart a wreck..."_

She swallowed and looked back to the door across the hall.

The smoke was thicker now - she could barely see the green glow of the words, and the floor was all but lost in her eyes. She yanked the rubber band off her wrist and wrapped her long hair into a ponytail.

This was it. If she could just get to the door -

"I'll give you a head start." The desk launched upwards around her, sending a flurry of sparks and ash into her face. "One."

She scrambled forward and thrust her way through the door and halted at the landing. The entire stairwell below her was swallowed in fire. She spun on her heel. She had no choice - the only way out was up.

She took the stairs three at a time. _Just four more floors,_ she thought, pulling herself up the flights as fast as she could.

A loud crunching sound shook the stairs. "Two!" she heard him yell from below. His heavy footfalls on the stairs were steady and slow.

He was biding his time.

When she got to the top of the stairs, she dove into the roof access door and skidded to a halt on the rooftop gravel. Andie quickly scraped away the rocks still stuck to her that were now red, and she crawled to the edge of the roof to look down. Firetrucks and police cars were swarming the intersection below while EMTs ran around between bodies and people strapped to gurneys.

"HELP!" she screamed as loudly as she could. but twenty four stories up, her cries for aid were swallowed whole in the roar of fire licking up through the windows below her.

She straightened up and tried turning around, but fell again onto her back when her thigh buckled under her weight, and she saw the tell-tale sharp bump of a broken femur poking out under her skin.

She rolled onto her stomach and spotted a fire escape ladder on the other side of the roof. She held herself up by her arms and dragged her leg behind her towards the escape.

A concussive blast from behind her knocked her down. The door blasted outward past her in pieces, dented and hot in the center from a charge.

The man emerged from the debris and tucked a spare charge into his utility belt.

"Three," he scoffed, flicking a piece of glass of his black and grey body armor. He strode over to her slowly and pressed his heavy boot into her injured thigh.

"Well," he said, putting more weight on her leg. "Isn't this nice?"

She scrambled at the stones around her, trying to grab onto anything - trying anything to get away from him.

He leaned down and grabbed her messy blonde ponytail, craning her face upwards. His other arm shoved it's way under her ribs and hoisted her up, facing her out towards the city away from him. Her legs dangled underneath her.

"I'm not partial to San Francisco, but you can't deny that view," he whispered in her ear, walking her to the edge of the building. For a brief moment, the smoke cleared, giving them a view of the city and a blast of cold, fresh air.

They both took a deep breath.

"Beautiful," he said, planting a kiss against her temple.

A tear crept down her cheek.

"Don't cry, darling," he said, turning her around and holding her in place at the elbows. "I promise - it will only hurt for a moment. You'll wake up a new woman." He pressed his forehead to hers.

"Please!" She sobbed. "Just leave me alone. I'm begging you!"

"Shh, shhhhhh," he spun her around and clasped a gloved hand over her mouth. "It will all be over soon. And you'll wake up a new Andie."

The smoke in the air was clogging her eyes. Her breaths were coming quickly and ragged. She needed to get away - now.

"Just one hit," he said, holding a piece of the metal door he'd broke, "And you won't remember a thing."

Andie looked out over the city, took in one more breath, and drove the scalpel into his groin as hard as she could.

"ARGH!"

His grip loosened just enough - she pushed off from him and used her good leg to launch herself off the roof into the smoke above the street. She turned over in the air in the moment of weightlessness before the fall to see him, hunched over as the fiery windows flew skywards around her.

"ANDIE, NO!" He screamed.

She let out a breath she'd been holding just before she hit the ground.


	2. Chapter 2: Security

The first thing Andie felt was the headache.

"Unghhhh." She rolled over and rested her forehead against the cool metal table -

 _Wait...metal?_ Her eyes shot open. Metal tables. Bright lights. Floor to ceiling freezers.

"Why on earth...?"

The tag wrapped around her toe answered that question. "Oh my god."

The morgue. She was in the morgue.

She stood up and wrapped the sheet around herself. The room was dark, save for a frosted office window on the other side of the room. Her head swam and she fell into another table, nearly knocking it over. "Hello?"

A clatter from behind her caught her attention, and she spun around to see a mortician standing beside a security guard.

"DON'T MOVE!" The guard stood at attention, aiming a taser at her.

She raised a hand slowly. "Please, I don't know where I am. Why am I -?" She was cut short by the sharp stinging of the taser in her chest. "Ahhh!"

"Put her under!" he ordered. The nurse tackled her and plunged a large needle into Andie's arm.

"Please, I don't understand!" she yelled, her voice starting to sound muffled. "Who are you? And why...? Where...?"

Everything faded to black.

* * *

"Good morning, sunshine!" When she woke up again, a man was standing at the foot of her bed wearing purple sunglasses and a armored suit, eating out of a pudding cup. "I hope you don't mind," he gestured to her uneaten dinner tray. "The vending machine's broken."

She looked around, perplexed. She was lying on a hospital bed and hooked up to dozens of machines and medical hoses. "What...?"

He took off his sunglasses and set a folder down on her lap. "My name's Hawkeye, and I heard you had a long night."

* * *

Hawkeye held out a thermos of hot chocolate. "More?"

Andie shook her head. "No, I'm fine."

The two of them sat in silence. Aside from the machines at her bedside whirring, it was pretty quiet in the ICU. Andie eyed the thick packet sitting on her lap, with A SHIELD insignia stamped over with a red 'classified'.

"Technically, I'm not supposed to leave without you."

"Meaning that there's no room for me to say 'no', right?"

"Yep."

"That's not likely," she yawned.

"I know, but the hospital's giving me free food, so I figured I'd hang out for a while and keep you company," He threw back the last of his drink and refilled it.

Andie opened the packet again and thumbed through it - a contract, confidentiality agreements...

He leaned in. "So you really don't remember anything?"

She shifted and covered up more with the blanket. "Well, that's not entirely true. I mean, I can't remember little things like what I ate for dinner two weeks ago on Sunday… But I can remember things like my name, the reason I'm here."

Hawkeye sighed. "Well, I'd think that since you know why you ended up here, that maybe might convince you to join us."

She looked away.

"We could protect you, you know." He soothed. "No one would know you're there." He approached the bed. "May I?"

She scooted over a bit, and he sat down.

"Look, I don't blame you for being scared," he said. "But, all we're asking is for you to think about it. You'd have your own private room and bath, high security, a panic room - heck, we'll put in a mini-fridge."

She chuckled.

"And JARVIS will always be around when we're out kicking bad guy butt," he added, nudging her arm with his. "Trust me, we've got this on lockdown."

She closed the folder and looked at him. "And me moving in wouldn't have anything to do with Mr. Stark's and Dr. Banner's obvious interest in my...abilities?"

He hesitated before answering. "Well… I mean, I'm sure they wouldn't mind having a human petri dish. I know _I'm_ interested in learning how you survived a fall from over twenty stories."

She shook her head. "I can't go through with this if don't understand how it works. It's extremely delicate, and not easy." She placed a hand over her chest. "It's like your heart - you don't tell it how to beat - it just does."

"Maybe you could show us?" He offered. "Then we'll understand better."

She looked at him uneasily. "I don't know..."

"What better way for us to understand than to see it in action?"

She took a long look at the Avenger. Hawkeye had been the most sociable of the group she'd seen, and definitely the easiest to talk to. Somehow, his promise of safety and understanding felt fuller. But still...

She rubbed the back of her neck and shook her head.

He sighed and picked up his quiver and bow. "Fine. I understand. But just so you know - " He knelt down beside the bed. " - The longer you stay here? The more at risk you're putting all the patients and their families if this guy comes back during visiting hours."

Andie looked away.

"The Avengers can give you protection, but it's not only your life that will be protected. It's everyone else's here. But we can't forcibly take you out of here. That's your call." He straightened himself up and handed her a card. "You'd be helping a lot of people, you know. Text me when you make a decision." He turned and walked out of the room, grabbing another donut on the way out.

Andie watched the doorway after he'd left, turning the card over and over again his her hands.

Outside at the nurse's station, she watched people walk back and forth. A little boy with a cast around his arm swung his legs back and forth, blissfully unaware of anything aside from the grape sucker in his mouth. Countless others passed by her room, drowning out the humming of her heart monitor.

She pulled back the sheets to look at her leg, which - just last night, had been snapped in half, but now, was completely healed.

"I'd be helping a lot of people," she whispered under her breath, running her hand over the faint bruise left there.

She sighed and sent out a text.

 _Hello, Hawkeye? It's Andie. I've changed my mind._

"Called it!" Hawkeye blurted out, leaning in her doorway from around the corner. "So, is that a 'yes' on the mini-fridge?"


	3. Chapter 3: Hesitation

"How do we know she isn't a double agent?" Steve asked.

Tony sighed sharply. "We don't."

The whole team was sitting around the table eating breakfast. Steve was decidedly _not_ eating - the idea of bringing someone into the tower that was at the center of a disaster with assumed ties to HYDRA was enough to throw off his appetite.

Hawkeye took another swig of orange juice. "She's not hiding anything."

"How could you know?" Steve pressed.

"Four rounds of truth serum ending in the same answers sure sounds concrete enough," Hawkeye said through a bite of a muffin.

"Truth serums don't always work," said Natasha. "If you're conditioned to keep secrets, there's no amount of torture or hypnosis that can side-step that."

"All right, all right," Tony said. "Let's look at the facts - and _only_ the facts," he looked pointedly at Steve, who just cleared his throat. "JARVIS?"

"Certainly, Sir." A large holographic screen rose from the center of the table and projected Andie's hospital pictures from the night she was admitted. Tony averted his eyes to Andie's injuries, and Steve and Natasha shared a disgusted look.

"Andie Williams - two days after the St. Francis fire in San Francisco with third degree burns, broken femur, a collapsed lung, severe fractures to her head, and a broken spine. She was pronounced dead at the scene after a swan dive off the roof of a 24 story building." He flipped though the pictures, not looking at them - he didn't want to loose the muffin he just finished. "Next, JARVIS."

JARVIS brought up a second window of video surveillance in a morgue, where Andie was seen fumbling around before being tazed and knocked out. "This was four days later in the SF morgue, aaaaaaaand - " Tony swept that slide away to show a live feed of security footage from the hospital. He hacked the system easily, and moved the camera to peer into her doorway, where she was waiting for her breakfast. "Here she is now."

If Steve couldn't keep anything down before, he would have definitely been sick now. There she was, sitting in what looked like perfect health, not two weeks after her brush with death, calmly sipping on a cup of coffee.

"She _lived_?" Natasha whispered to Steve.

"How is it possible that a human could survive such a fall?" Thor asked from over his small mountain of empty pop-tart wrappers.

"Banner, that's you," Tony said, tossing a hologram screen at him.

"Uh, well it's hard to tell since I haven't seen her DNA up close," he typed quickly on a lit up keyboard and fixed his glasses. "But judging by her charts from the hospital and the blood samples, her immune system is in over drive. I'll have to run a few more tests once she get here to find out how her body is-"

"Once she gets here?" Steve interrupted. "I thought this was going up for a vote."

"It's more of a briefing, really," Tony stated.

"So everyone else's opinions don't matter?" Steve stood up.

"Calm down, Cap," Natasha reached out and grabbed his arm.

Tony stood up across from him. "Bringing her here is the best way to find out what she can do for us, Cap. And to find out what connection she has with HYDRA, actually."

"We all live here, Stark - we should put it to a vote."

"Fine, you want to vote?" He looked at the others at the table. "Mr. All-American here wants a good old-fashioned voting, guys. All for bringing little miss med kit into the tower?"

Hawkeye and Banner's hands rose first, followed by Thor. Steve's eyes slid over to Natasha, whose hand slowly rose.

"It's the best way, Cap," she said quietly.

"Majority rules," Tony said, shutting off the projection.

Steve stood and left the room with a copy of Andie's file. He could feel his skin crawling under his armor, and a bitter taste on the back of his tongue. He called for the elevator and closed his eyes, trying to reign in his anger. When the door opened he stepped inside.

"Going up?" Asked Natasha, walking up to him.

"Down," he said.

She stepped in anyway. "We don't know if she's actually HYDRA, Steve."

"Did Tony send you to calm me down?"

"Why? Are you the Hulk?" She asked. "I know my moral compass doesn't point exactly true north, but if my ledger is good enough to be a part of this team, we'd be hypocrites for not at least giving this a chance."

He breathed in and let out a sharp sigh. "Not now, Natasha."

The elevator dinged, and the doors opened. He strode out.

"Cap."

Steve turned around.

"Whoever it was that broke into that hospital and killed all of those people? He's the bad guy here. She was running away from him. Just remember that." The doors closed between them, and the elevator when back the way it came.

Steve walked into his room and flipped a switch. A wall lit up with a huge cork-board mounted on it with pictures and newspaper clippings tacked all over it. It was a web, with a picture of Bucky in the middle. His trails had all gone cold in his attempts to find out what happened to Bucky after the collapse of SHIELD.

But maybe...

He pinned Andie's picture to the wall.

If she had anything to do with HYDRA, maybe she knew something about where he was.


End file.
